Dark waters

Lilli Carré takes us spelunking in the depths of The Lagoon

By Mairead Case
Published: December 9th, 2008 | 1:05pm

The Lagoon looks beautiful. It’s a slim, 80-page comic, with a cover of a girl holding a golden helmet. Lilli Carré’s story is even more impressive. In it, a family (sweet, spacey Grandpa, restless mother, clueless father, curious Zoey, and Zoey’s curious-er cat) is seduced by the song of the Weird Black Lizard Thing haunting the swamp outside.

Carré’s bold, black-and-white panels play cleverly with negative space. Her signature horizontal-comma-eyes, spaghettied fingers, and weirdly-shaded noses are all charmingly on display here too. The whole is tough and delicate at once, sweet but never saccharine, with echoes of horror and O’Connor’s Southern gothic.

Like That Thing itself, twenty-six-year-old Carré, who’s also worked in animation, seduces through rhythm and memory. Her stories are circular instead of linear, unified by mirrored shapes (cattails, cigarette smoke) and repeated sounds (owls, metronomes). She lets each reader decide who to root for and what actually happened. The intuitive and curious will fall in love – especially with Carré’s lusty, mysterious ending. I can’t wait to see what she does next.
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ABOUT THE BOOK
The Lagoon (Fantagraphics Books)
By Lilli Carre
80 pages, $14.99